Japanese Cinema - vo.rs

Branded to Kill: Suzuki's Hit-Man Film That Got Him Sacked

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 11:00:00 +0000

In 1967 a Japanese studio director named Seijun Suzuki delivered a black-and-white gangster picture to his employers at Nikkatsu, and it cost him his career. The studio boss, Kyusaku Hori, watched Branded to Kill, declared it incomprehensible and unprofitable, and fired the man who made it. Suzuki, who had cranked out roughly forty programme pictures for Nikkatsu on tight budgets and tighter schedules, found himself blacklisted from the industry for the better part of a decade. He sued the studio and eventually won, but the years in the wilderness were real. He had been sacked, essentially, for making a film that was too much itself.

Cure (1997): Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Hypnotist and the Empty Detective

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 11:00:00 +0000

A series of murders in Tokyo. Each victim has the same wound, a large X cut into the throat and chest. Each killer is a different, ordinary person — a policeman, a doctor, a schoolteacher — caught at the scene, fully confessing, utterly unable to say why they did it. That is the engine of Cure, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 breakthrough, and it is worth stating up front that the film has no interest in the thing every other serial-killer picture is built to deliver: the reveal, the profile, the click of a motive locking into place. Kurosawa withholds all of it, and the withholding is the horror.

Tetsuo: The Iron Man: Tsukamoto's Body-Horror Assault

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Tetsuo: The Iron Man runs sixty-seven minutes, was shot on 16mm in black and white by a tiny crew over something like eighteen exhausting months, and hits like a cattle prod. Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 debut is the loudest quiet film you will ever see — a near-wordless industrial nightmare about a man turning into scrap metal, assembled frame by punishing frame in the director’s own apartment with a cast of friends who doubled as crew. Nothing about its budget or its length should produce something this overwhelming. It does anyway, and thirty-five years later almost everything that has tried to copy it looks tame.